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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

AP Planner is an editorial planning tool from The Associated Press that provides journalists, public relations professionals and others with a rolling calendar of important upcoming events to support their research and planning.

Access to AP Planner is sold on a subscription basis. An annual contract is required. The subscription price depends upon your specific needs - an AP Planner sales representative will work with you to determine your best option and price. e-mail.

AP Planner consolidates in one place significant state, national and international events occurring during the next 12 months. Events are screened for significance and interest, then categorized and coded by event type. Data on the events are assembled and slotted into a consistent structure. Multiple search methods enable users to sort through a huge amount of data to retrieve the information that will help them manage their editorial operation or businesses more efficiently and intelligently.

AP Planner is broad in scope. It contains information concerning finance and economics, government and politics, science and healthcare, information technology and telecommunications, media and entertainment, international events and much more. The categories of events include anniversaries and awareness days, trade conferences and exhibitions, IPO announcements and shareholder meetings. AP Planner is for scheduling and does not contain AP news in any form.

Anyone with a business need to anticipate upcoming events, think ahead, and plan strategically needs AP Planner. People who will find this service most useful include journalists, public relations professionals, investor relations professionals, media agencies, researchers, corporate marketers, strategic planners, financial analysts and traders, government planners just to name a few.

People use AP Planner for a variety of reasons. Journalists use AP Planner to help track events they will cover and to generate story ideas. Public relations executives use AP Planner to develop and schedule client campaigns for optimal timing and media exposure. Media agencies can maximize marketing and advertising impact by scheduling events and campaigns to coincide with the news cycle, boosting their client return on marketing dollars spent. Corporate marketers and planners can gain advance knowledge of customers, markets and competitors, thereby gaining an important competitive advantage. Financial analysts and traders can stay abreast of market-moving events, and government staffers can plan calendars around events with political and economic significance. The uses of AP Planner multiply with your business creativity.

AP Planner aggregates content from tens of thousands of organizations worldwide. A dedicated team of researchers is supplemented by a wide variety of secondary sources, including newspapers, trade magazines, scientific journals, corporate announcements, company and research Web sites, and more.

The AP Planner research staff employs data verification and updating processes designed to provide you with completely reliable and up-to-date information. All new events are verified back to the original source, and current events are continuously monitored for changes and revised as necessary.

AP Planner employs best practices in the utilization of both its highly skilled research team and its advanced technology research tools to ensure that changes to listed events are discovered, validated, and quickly made available to users. Whenever a previously listed event is changed on AP Planner, an “Update” icon appears near the upper right corner of the listing.

AP Planner contains a wide range of events from the worlds of news and current affairs, politics, entertainment, lifestyle, business and financial, and many other areas of interest. Event types include economic stats, product launches, reports and surveys, celebrity appearances, social media and corporate calendars.

AP Planner includes today’s events and those that occur 12 months into the future. AP Planner’s coverage rolls forward with your subscription, ensuring that you are always able to plan a full year ahead.

The ability to quickly access the events of interest to you is one of AP Planner’s greatest strengths. AP Planner includes extensive search capabilities that allow you to search by time, event type, category, and organization name. All search criteria can be employed in combination providing you with highly-filtered results that include only the data which interests you.

At any time during the search process you may click on the “More Info” button to obtain additional information. This button, which appears near the lower right hand corner of each listing, generates a popup screen providing active links to the sponsoring organization’s website as well as e-mail addresses for the event contacts.

AP Planner allows you to define a customized search, assign it a meaningful name, save it, and then re-run the same search whenever you want. You can do this for as many searches as you wish and save them all for future use in the My Searches section. There is no need to recreate what you have already spent valuable time developing. These searches can also be converted into email alerts. See below.

As a subscriber you may login and execute saved and new searches as often as you wish. However, you can stay current with your saved searches by setting up Email Alerts. You can request Email Alerts be e-mailed to you daily for any or all of your saved searches. E-mail alerts can be turned on and off at your discretion.

The Custom Planner section provides subscribers the ability to add their own private events to their own private section of the application. Users may personalize both saved and user-added events. These events and edits will not be displayed to subscribers outside of your organization. This content can also be exported as required.

Subscribers to AP Planner benefit from the functionality that collaboration features provide. Saved events and user-added events can be shared with your colleagues, and comments and links are accessible to all.